This blog is dedicated to treating everyone - clients, prospects, friends, and family - as valuable partners. We should show them our gratitude through all our actions, including our marketing.

June 10, 2012

Appreciation Marketing – Procrastination, The Art of Failure

Procrastination is one of the worst practices that you can
adopt.While being dishonest or
unethical rank high with failed businesses, procrastination can kill a business
very quickly.We can all work hard to
develop our prospects, maintain our customer base, and keep abreast of new
marketing trends and ideas, but we can lose our competitive edge by allowing
procrastination to take over our practices.

Does everyone that you know or meet, know what your business
is?Are you ashamed of what you do for a
living?Your neighbors, your family,
everyone that you know must know what your business is.What if your neighbor tells you about this
great product or service that they just purchased from your competitor or
someone else in your company?Don’t want
to impose on your neighbors or friends?You are doing them a disservice by not sharing great products or
services with them.What if they have a
great referral for you that you may miss by keeping your business a secret?

Procrastination’s most prominent aspect is lack of follow up
with your prospects and clients.You
must follow up with everyone.Do not
prejudge anyone; always treat everyone as a potential client, every client as a
potential referral source, and every referral as a valued prospect.Follow up, follow up, and follow up with
everyone; omit no one from your follow up.Businesses have many new clients as a result of their consistent, persistent
follow up.

Think that you can put off contacting that referral that
someone gave to you?You do a disservice
to the person giving it to you if you delay.Also, don’t forget to thank the person giving that referral to you,
letting them know how much you appreciate them putting money into your pocket.If the referral didn’t work out well, tell
the referring party how much you appreciated the referral, but also let them
know why it didn’t work out.

One of the aspects of procrastination is isolation.When you procrastinate in your business you
tend to isolate yourself.You stop
calling prospects, your stop talking with clients, and you don’t meet with your
networking partners.You cannot grow and
develop yourself if you isolate yourself.You get stale, lose your competitive edge, and cease to learn new
techniques and relearn those techniques that you have stopped using.Some people believe that they don’t need
anyone else and never speak to anyone in person or by phone.They try to communicate by email, fax, text,
and social media.They are usually
failures in their business and in life.

Procrastination is the principle of the doubting
businessperson.We all experience it
from time to time; we must not allow it to grow and fester in our brain and
heart.We must recognize it for what it
is, a killer of business success.We
have to root it out and purge any remnant of it from our day to day
actions.If we allow it to take over our
lives, we will not experience any success, because it will dominate our
actions.

Today write a card to someone, make a call to someone, or make
an appointment to go see someone.Maybe
you could just drop into someone’s business and see if they have a moment.Let me know what you do and what happens, and
we can share with others.Leave me your
comments, or email me at Jim@SOC4Now.com, or call me at 360-314-8691.Get out of your
shell and tell people about your business and what you can do to make their
lives better.If you give to give, not
to get, you will succeed and prosper, and you will fell better about yourself.Just get in motion and take action.

3 comments:

ALL home based business owners have this problem. We get mired down in what we are doing, do not want to leave home, and get comfortable with our business. You are right Jim - that is the beginning of the end for a business. Food for thought...